“ Select your primary opportunities”
When you launch new brand in Big pharma
The first consideration is to determine the degree of value each opportunity represents so you can quickly gauge and select your best choices. There are several ways to assess which opportunities are primary, but first, you must establish the outcomes you desire so you can measure your success.
Do you want to achieve as many sales as rapidly as possible because your company’s main objective is gross revenue? If so, you must target as many customers as possible so you can build a big customer list. Or is the primary objective of your company’s success focusing on profits? If so, you’ll need to focus efforts on the most profitable segment achievable in the short term.
The first characteristic that must be determined is your brand’s commercial attractiveness. Again, you have two choices:
1. Are you more interested in immediate sales, or
2. Would you rather gain a strategic advantage?
Let’s take a look at both options.
Commercial Reward vs. Strategic Reward
Thinking about your choice of preferred outcomes, you must remember there are two indicators that should be included in your calculations.
Clearly, the first value is determining how much commercial reward the opportunity represents.
The pharmaceutical markets are overloaded with patients and competitors, so an assessment of the commercial value of the opportunity and how many patients may become subscribers of your brand is a primary consideration.
Because your strategy’s survival demands that you manage the sales performance expectations of your company’s leaders, when you assess the size of each opportunity, you must measure the size of this opportunity’s readily available market, the low-lying fruit, and not measure it against your estimate of the size of the total market. The readily available market consists of only those customers and patients you can easily access. The total market is the combined market of both the accessible market, and all latent opportunities that may later develop into future customers through disease awareness campaigns that encourage undiagnosed patients to seek help, and which also educate stakeholders, leading them to increase their diagnosis and treatment levels.
A Second Approach for Assessing the Opportunity’s Attractiveness: Strategic Value
Another approach, which may have better dividends for you, is to analyze the attractiveness of an opportunity for its strategic value. From this perspective, it may not be in your best interests to only target a potentially large population for your brand.
As an example, if you launch a new innovative treatment that is directed at a specialized disease such as with neuro-psychiatry, cardiology, or pulmonology, patients are likely to see both GPs and specialists. Since specialists are usually limited in number, you might consider marketing to a smaller patient segment, such as the segment served by specialists. Even though GPs treat more patients than specialists, GPs usually follow the behavior of the specialists.
With the same mindset, you can target a numerically small patient profile at the time of launch
because of its strategic value with potentially creating momentum by minimizing the physicians’ resistance to changing their prescription habits.
Winning this small patient profile has a big strategic value as it will instill trust with the physicians, which in turn will open the door to bigger patient profile opportunities that are initially difficult to achieve if you include GPs at the beginning of your campaign without first creating trust with them.
